Student blogs

Career opportunity is undeniably be one of the major aspects to consider when applying to a study programme. At the time I applied, I saw myself to become the clinical informaticians, but then I discovered the vast career options within health informatics. So let’s start breaking them down.

Career in industry

Most of the health informatics projects are heavily related to the IT sector and so as the career opportunities. IT project managers, clinical informaticians, developers, analysts, designers, basically any roles exist in the IT project team that you can think of. Several courses in the program offer team project assignments where we can learn and practice on working effectively within a team on our assigned role. And if we are creative enough, we can also submit the assignment topic to an extracurricular competition to gain more experience. Aside from that, there will be several guest lecturers from companies affiliated with this programme. Sweden, particularly Stockholm, is also known to house lots of innovative companies and startups, including the ones focusing in the health informatics area.

Career in academia

By being taught in one of the best university in the world will also provide us with the exposure to the academic perspective of health informatics. Researcher and lecturer in health informatics field are also growing in demand along with the expansion of the field. We are being preprared through the courses where we learn the systematic thinking, scientific research methodology, writing scientific reports, oral presentation, and many more. If we have the passion seed of pursuing academia career already planted, it will surely grow and blossom through the programme. Furthermore, the programme is jointly held by two universities, Karolinska Institutet and Stockholm University, which also broaden up the network. Then, it is up to us to nurture the passion by truly stepping in the academia path.

The upgraded us

There has never been a necessity for us to change our career path after graduating. In fact, it is always fine if we are doctors, nurses, pharmacist, therapist, etc. and we still want to continue working as such after graduation. The same goes to us if we came from the computer science background and still want to stick with this current career path. However, after graduating we are more than the previous us. We will be the upgraded version of us. So whenever there is a project or task related to health informatics, we could provide our expertise in the area while still working in our habitat.

Eventhough we currently do not have the official record of the alumni and where they are working currently, but we are building the health informatics alumni network. This way, we can have better career tracking and evaluation of how relevant is the programme for the graduates.

In the end, as the saying goes, the sky is the limit. The career options are not only limited all that have been mentioned here. You can also read it on the programme description in the Karolinska Institutet page and Stockholm University page. What is the career role that you are looking forward to? Share it with me in the comment section below!